Replacing wild card characters in EXCEL

[arjay010]

I have an excel file that contains * in some of the cells (it was use
to denote specifics about a person, and is entered as *Smith).

I can not use find/replace to remove it because it is a wildcard, and
it removes everything in the column. I can not find anywhere to
change the wildcards.

Has anyone solved this?

Thank you

Bob

 

[Dave Peterson]

Search excel's help for wildcard and you'll see that to find/change a wildcard,
you use a special character first:

The tilde (~) is the character that does this.

~* to find *
~? to find ?
~~ to find ~

 

[David McRitchie]

While on the topic
Escape characters
in formats and in System Search
use a backslash (in Unix it is escape character for #,@, and $),
in Find/Replace use a tilde.
to search for * or ? or ~, you enter it as ~*, ~? and ~~, respectively.
In headers and footers to see an ampersand (&) double them as
in AT&&T.
in assignment statements Double quotes within double quotes are doubled.